In the New York Times, Eric Lichtblau has a major scoop describing some of the secret rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, aka the FISC (and sometimes just called “the FISA court”). According to Lichtblau’s sources, described as “current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions,” the FISA court has issued over a dozen significant rulings. Some of the rulings are “nearly 100 pages long.” Although Lichtblau purports to summarize the rulings, I find his descriptions a frustrating read. Maybe it’s just me, but I find Lichtblau’s writing to be sufficiently vague that his distillation of the opinions leaves me with more questions than answers. In this post, I want to go through what Lichtblau says about the Fourth Amendment rulings of the FISA court and why his descriptions leave me confused. I’ll try to get to the statutory issues in a future post.